


stack the decks

by deniigiq



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Cancer, Cuddling & Snuggling, Hospitals, M/M, Major Illness, getting sick and then getting better, i'm not about to kill foggy friends my heart is far too weak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 22:27:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14435439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: When the results came back, Matt cried with him, letting his tears roll down his face as he cradled Foggy’s firmly and told him, “You are going to be okay,” over and over and over.Matt said it like he was challenging God himself.





	stack the decks

**Author's Note:**

> vague discussions of cancer. Nothing too graphic, but please do what you need to to take care of yourself.  
> No character death, I promise. I am too weak to kill any of them (that's a fucking lie, but I'm not sure I'd post it).

Matt was on the hunt to find whatever cards Foggy’s shit luck had been prophesized on so that he could tear them to shreds and light them on fucking fire. Foggy wasn’t sure he should feel so endeared by such a display of rage, but, things being as they were, he did.

Matt wouldn’t find those cards, though, because DNA doesn’t happen on paper. Cancer, however, often does come written on paper.

Matt promised him they’d burn those ceremonially too when this was all over.

It had started with aches and pain and splitting headaches. Foggy thought they were migraines, but after the second night waking up to pounding, searing pain, it had become clear that they were not fucking migraines. He’d jokingly asked Matt to smell him like one of those cancer-sniffing dogs.

Matt didn’t huff a laugh like he usually did. He’d gone still for exactly 2 seconds before panicking. Foggy didn’t need super hearing to sense his rapid-fire heartbeat. The stammering and sudden offers to take him to the hospital made it real.

If Matt thought it was doctor-worthy, it was probably a death sentence.

Evidently, they shared that nightmare, too. When the results came back, Matt cried with him, letting his tears roll down his face as he cradled Foggy’s firmly and told him, “You are going to be okay,” over and over and over.

Matt said it like he was challenging God himself.

After a few sessions of radiotherapy, Foggy started losing his lion’s mane. He hadn’t thought so much about what his hair meant to him until it was gone, and he felt vain and petty as he chased the remaining locks with tears. Matt shaved his own head so that they matched, and he hadn’t thought it would affect him half as much as it did. Matt had beautiful auburn hair; it was soft and silky and he loved it to be petted and ruffled. He was a bit shy about it, but occasionally, when they were hammered beyond belief, he’d let Foggy at it for a little while.

Now, he was cold as fuck. He said it made his helmet fit better to make Foggy laugh, but when he came to see him, the tips of Matt’s ears were always bright red from the cold and the rain. Foggy tried to make him wear a beanie, to which he responded “What’s the point, if you’re not doing it too?”

Foggy pointed out that he was snug as a bug inside, but Matt waved all his arguments off before climbing in bed with him and demanding that he read to him. Karen and Claire called this rude as fuck. Even Frank had raised an eyebrow like _Do I gotta be the one to tell this guy that this is not okay?_ But Matt knew Foggy and knew that Foggy’s entire self-worth was wrapped up in doing things for other people. So, Matt went out of his way to find a book that the library didn’t have in braille, so he could whine and bitch and moan for Foggy to read it to him because he _had_ to know what happened to Mary McNeill and her roguish highland Scot, Foggy, he just _had to_.

It was hard to read the damn thing without collapsing into laughter, and Matt’s giggling made it even better.

It almost made the pain lancing up and down his skin and the ache in his bones bearable.

Matt came when he could, and while it wasn’t everyday, Foggy could see that he was trying to make it that way. He came in with black eyes and split knuckles. He flinched when Foggy brushed against his ribs when they were cuddled up together. He sometimes tucked his head into Foggy’s neck and breathed long, shaky breaths, full of unshed tears for Foggy and for whoever he’d kept alive and safe that night. Foggy would pet his hair when he came in like that; unlike his own, it was growing in thick already, but it still had the prickly, silky feel of a new cut to it. In a few more weeks, it would be long enough to bury a hand in.

Karen brought him foods he couldn’t eat and sent him the most ridiculous examples of journalism she could find. She brought books for him to read to Matt once they’d finished with Mary McNeill’s adventures. She fucked up her back by sprawling half on his bed and half in her chair while they listened to true crime podcasts.

More than once, he met Frank’s eyes in the doorway and quietly gave him the okay to drag Karen home to sleep and unwind like she desperately needed to. Frank was an unlikely ally, he had to say. He even intervened on Foggy’s behalf when Matt’s desperation started to fray his seams. Those hands, it turned out, could be gentle. Even with Matt.

His parents came and his dad couldn’t stop crying, no matter how many times Foggy told them he was doing really well. His sister white-knuckled her way through the whole interaction. After they’d kissed and hugged and waved goodbye, he wished that they hadn’t come. It seemed like they’d left in greater distress than ever before.

It was also a bit selfish. Foggy didn’t want them to see him like this.

He lost a lot of weight and then lost some more he couldn’t afford to between the vomiting and pain and the complete lack of appetite. Matt, predictably, freaked the fuck out. And although he would never, ever say it in front of Foggy, Foggy could tell that he smelt like the dying. Matt sometimes scrambled up when he thought Foggy was asleep and sprinted down the hallway to the restroom. He was losing weight too. But no matter how many times Foggy told him that he didn’t have to come, he did and he started bringing flowers.

Matt couldn’t see flowers, couldn’t see how the singles and bouquets collecting in cheap vases in every corner of Foggy’s room created fluffy, dizzying sprays of texture. He couldn’t see sunsets of roses cuddled in close with sour licks of tulips. He had no sense of the waves of mint and emerald which arched and curled over each other among all those petals. Baby’s breath hovered in the still air above the arrangements, hanging like dust motes. And Matt couldn’t see them.

But he could smell them and feel them, and that’s why he brought them. Foggy realized after the first couple of weeks that, in the same way sighted people take skies and the sun for granted, Matt unconsciously decided that Foggy could smell much in the same way he could. He assumed that Foggy could smell his body wasting and brought him flowers to help him and to help the room smell like something nicer, something tolerable, something living.

Foggy didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was already acclimated to the smell of his own rotting body and that the flowers had all started to smell the same to him. They helped Matt stay with him for longer stretches of time, though, so he kept them and, when no one was visiting, he picked out the wilted and dying ones so that the whole composition would stay fresh. One of the nurses brought him some string and taught him which ones were good for drying and how. They hung the drying ones opposite the window.

It was a great distraction for all the awful shit in between flowers.

Then, finally, blissfully, the treatments came to an end.

Karen and Frank took him home; they claimed they didn’t know where Matt was.

He was at the apartment once they’d arrived; he’d scrubbed the whole place within an inch of its life and had done all Foggy’s laundry and even gotten groceries for the fridge (Foggy later got out of him that he’d recruited a friend of his to help with the groceries, he wouldn’t tell him who, but Foggy suspected it was Spiderman). Once Karen and Frank left, Matt shooed him off to rest and cleaned up the kitchen. Foggy watched him collapse onto the couch from his doorway and felt guilty in his throat but incredibly warm in his chest.

Matt spent half of his time desperately trying to keep his own shit together, combatting depression with a furious work ethic and nights upon nights of bloody knuckles. And yet he’d gone out of his way to do what he couldn’t even do for himself for Foggy to come home to.

“Hey Matty,” he called softly. Matt sat up on the couch in an instant.

“What’s up, Fogs? What do you need?” he asked, getting back to his feet.

“Can you come here?” Foggy patted the bed next to him.

Matt sat down next to him on the bed, but Foggy had had enough of that. He wrapped an arm around Matt’s waist and pulled him just enough to tip him over; Matt caught himself before he fell into Foggy’s chest, but got the point. He sighed and brought his legs up onto the bed and curled into Foggy’s armpit, face tucked in his ribs. Foggy took his glasses and nudged them onto the bedside table. Matt looked as tired as that sigh.

“Thank you,” Foggy told him, smoothing his thick again hair back. Matt tossed an arm over his sunken belly and cuddled in closer.

“Anytime,” he murmured.

“Will you stay?” Foggy asked. Matt hummed again and nuzzled into his ribs.

“Do you want me to?” he asked.

“Kind of a lot? Probably the most I ever have?” Foggy said. Matt laughed.

“Love you too, pal.”

“Matty, I really mean it. Thank you.”

“And I really mean it, I love you.”

It wasn’t a shock, wasn’t a surprise by any stretch of the imagination, but it still felt like a twist in his diaphragm. Still made his eyes hurt and his throat tighten.

“I love you, too,” he got out.

Matt turned his face up to him, looking sleepy. He got up on an elbow and planted a kiss on the corner of Foggy’s mouth before settling back down with a pleased sigh.

“Want to listen to true crime?” he asked, feeling around for Foggy’s tablet. Foggy couldn’t help but laugh, because of course Matt’s idea of romance involved murder.

“Yeah, alright, let’s start the one about identity theft.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> the identity theft episode is a Criminal reference. If you aren't listening to that shit, I dunno what you're doing with your life.


End file.
